Monday 4 July 2011

The development and design process for the next version of the Devon & Cornwall Police Website

Introduction

The digital media team is now in the process of conceptualising a new version of the force website to allow us to engage with you more effectively (and locally) and offer a more efficient and personalized service to our communities.

We would like to

  1. Integrate the Local policing (Neighbourhood) site and the main Force website.
  2. Integrate the Online Crime Reporting form with a personalized login to enable the tracking of the investigation’s progress.
  3. Introduce a home hub landing page with various user group specific doorways into the site.
    1. Report a crime / lost or found
    2. Youth
      1. Jnrspace.info
      2. Yrspace.info
    3. News
    4. Traffic incidents / road conditions
    5. Bumblebee – auction site
    6. Postcode login – to filter content local to you – news, appeals, campaigns, traffic incidents and crime figures (Facebook, Twitter)?
    7. And access to all unfiltered information the website
  4. Introduce a postcode generated personalized homepage using cookies to remember your preferences possibly incorporating shortcuts to pages selected by the user.
  5. Provide an emailed pdf newsletter of the local policing team pages.
These are just some of the ideas we have in the melting pot but first we thought we would get your thoughts on our current site to make sure we keep your favourite features whilst adding some new developments.

We have started a programme of consultation and usability testing and include links to the forms below if you would like to get involved in shaping our future online communications.

We have also created some questionnaires along with snap poll questions, which we plan to place on Facebook, our main site and some of our sub sites.

The intention of this blog is to start a conversation with the people of Devon & Cornwall about the Devon & Cornwall Police website and how we can improve it.

Please feel free to take a look at the questionnaire/s and complete, one, some or even all (!) if you have the time.

If questionnaires are not your thing please just post a comment we would love to hear about the things you like/dislike, how you access the site, where and for what reason. Tell us how the site could work better for you and if you have any ideas for new features you’d like to see. We will review all your comments with a view to including them in a specification document made available on this blog in the future (although please note we do not have a huge budget and will be using our in-house skills).

Initially we aim to post updates at least once a month and as the consultation progresses we would like to post details and jpegs of designs for your thoughts and opinion. Further down the line we would also like to include links to mini test sites and even possibly a beta site for you to try and break!

Thank you for reading our first post and please feel free to submit a reply to this post to get the conversation going as we are really looking forward to hearing your views and engaging with you. 

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